Kobo has quietly unveiled a new section of their website where readers can purchase e-books published by Wattpad. There are currently 18 titles being showcased on the main landing page and prices range from $1.00 to $12.00.
Wattpad is social media platform for telling stories, all of the prose on the site is user-generated content. The service currently attracts over 40 million users per month, growing at a rate of over 1 new user per second.
At its very essence Wattpad is a self-publishing platform where its 90% readers and 10% writers. A lot of Wattpad’s content is unfinished when it’s first uploaded. The encouragement and acknowledgement from the Wattpad community inspires writers to keep going.
In 2014 Wattpad wanted to take its most successful authors and have them transcend the platform. Wattpad begun to utilize Amazon Createspace to make physical versions of the books available and have them distributed to bookstores. They also started to submit the same books to self-publishing services such as Kindle Direct Publishing and Nook Press.
It makes sense that Kobo is going the extra mile by creating a dedicated section to showcase the best Wattpad e-book titles because both companies are located in Toronto.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.